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This paper provides an overview of transitions across forensic child and adolescent mental health services in England and Wales. The purpose of this paper is to delineate the national secure services system for young people in contact with the youth justice system.

This paper reviews findings from the existing literature of transitions across forensic child and adolescent mental health services, drawing attention to present facilitators and barriers to optimal transition. The authors examine the infrastructure of current services and highlight gaps between child and adult service continuity and evaluate the impact of poor transitions on young offenders’ mental health and wellbeing.

Young offenders experience a broad range of difficulties, from the multiple interfaces with the legal system, untreated mental health problems, and poor transition to adult services. Barriers such as long waiting lists, lack of coordination between services and lack of transition preparation impede significantly smooth transitions.

The authors need to develop, test and evaluate models of transitional care that improve mental health and wellbeing of this group.

Mapping young offenders’ care pathway will help to understand their needs and also to impact current policy and practice. Key workers in forensic services should facilitate the transition process by developing sustainable relationships with the young person and creating a safe clinical environment.

Transition of care from forensic child and adolescent mental health services is a neglected area. This paper attempts to highlight the nature and magnitude of the problems at the transition interface in a forensic context.

There is substantial evidence that young people moving from child and adolescent mental health services to adult services are more likely to experience poor transitions. However, little is known about the care pathways of young people transitioning from forensic services. This retrospective case note review sought to examine the clinical characteristics, transition pathways and psychosocial indicators of transition outcomes amongst young people in forensic medium secure services discharged to adult services.

The electronic records of 32 young people, who transitioned from six adolescent medium secure units in England to adult services between May 2015 and June 2016, were examined.

Approximately 65% of young people were between 18 and 19 years at the time of transition and the average waiting time from referral to discharge was six months. A total of 63% young people transitioned to community placements and adult medium secure services. Four pathways describing the journey into and out of adolescent medium secure services were identified in a subsample of 12 young people. A total of 25% young people with neurodevelopmental problems moved to specialist services.

The results suggest that diagnosis, severity of offence and clinical background are associated with transition pathway. Promoting a person-centred approach and gradual independence of the young person may improve current practice.

These results inform existing policy and clinical practice in an effort to reform transition guidelines around young people’s needs during transition times. Further studies in adolescent forensic services are needed to understand complex neurodevelopmental problems and comorbidities.

Though some disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM) abstractions and core concepts may appear transparently obvious to some readers, others might not easily grasp the complexities embedded in them. This chapter focusses on the main arguments connected to DRRM. It unravels some of the complexities that abound in the framing of key disaster risk reduction concepts in literature. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part focusses on understanding the dynamics of disasters. This part revisits definitions of disasters in literature, how they have been conceptualised in academia and what makes them different from other related concepts such as hazards, crisis, vulnerabilities and emergencies. Furthermore, considering that some impacts of disasters are more obvious than others, it examines some of the less conspicuous relationships between disasters and other phenomena. The second part examines the concept of DRRM in existing literature, highlighting the importance of resilience in DRRM and revisiting key methodological approaches in building resilience among communities. The third part places the concept of DRRM within the African context. It demonstrates the delicate aspects embedded in successful DRRM in Africa amid institutional development and policy issues. This part concludes with the identification of key knowledge gaps in DRRM in Africa. These knowledge gaps identified in the wider literature are used to justify why the chapters in this book and the context covered (sub-Saharan Africa) are of utmost importance in DRRM.